


Paradise Circus

by Preemmodschoom



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Murder, hope you like it :')
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:53:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28699461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Preemmodschoom/pseuds/Preemmodschoom
Summary: "No matter what happens, sweetie, don't scream, don't cry, don't even think. If they find you—Run."Valerie loves her mom and dad. She loves her best friends; Valentina and Vincent, her math teacher; Ms. Darlene, and the music box she got from Grandma V before she died.She loves her mom and dad.That's why she pretends she's scared at night; so she can sleep in their room, so she can lay on her father's fuzzy chest, and warm her feet under her mom's butt.Too bad the monsters are real this time.
Relationships: Johnny Silverhand/Female V, Judy Alvarez/Female V
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	Paradise Circus

_ Mother, Don't Worry  _

* * *

His blood is cold. His heart is still beating against Valerie's cheek, but his blood is cold. She absorbs this fact an ounce at a time, to the thick plop, plop as he drains through her sticky hair. She knew about her mom already, because her feet, fastened beneath her mother's thigh, are soaked in pee. Everyone knows people pee when they die. Everyone knows their heart stops. Her father's hasn't. His physical state enters her mind as something she might learn for a history exam.  
Who is the founder of Arasaka corporation: Sasai Arasaka.  
Thu-bump.  
Who is the inventor of braindance: Yuriko Sujimoto.   
Thu-bump  
Why is your father's blood cold: He is dead.   
Thu-bump.   


Liquid trickles down her scalp, her brow, settles in the line of her mouth where she scrapes it out with softening nails; but her hand leaves just as much blood behind, and the flow of copper from her father is constant. There must be pints inherited to her. She doesn't want any of it, can't listen to his heart beat anymore—to the shriek of antique furniture legs on concrete, the metallic clatter of silverware and old batteries from kitchen drawers, the lull of her grandmother's jewelry box.   


Valentina's house might as well be 1,000 kilometers away with those scavengers standing between her and the doors.   


Eyes sealed, she paws her way out of her parent's slack arms, out of their wet, tangled blankets, slipping onto cold tile one foot at a time. The whole bed is a mess of soggy nylon dripping to the floor, but Valerie's hands are so wet she almost skips the dry corner of sheet. Her nose and mouth are first to the blanket, blown and scrubbed, and emptied of the overpowering stench of metal and meat. She catches lingerings of ocean fresh detergent and almost chokes on the familiarity.   


Her dad told her not to cry. She can't.   
She won't.   


She scours her face with the fabric, soaks jelly from her eyes—covers everything that's left of her parent's scent, and drops the rag. She stares at the mess painting her brown arms and knees. Blood streaks her vision; her satin nightgown is heavy with it. The sheet corner isn't big enough to clean her whole body, but she scrubs anyway, or else she would have to face her parents; see them limp in their cloudy pajamas, surrounded by their storm of red. Everything fractured. Stripped.   


The music box stops. The scav in Valerie's room cranks it. Somehow between the bullets and looting, they found enough humanity to take joy from plastic earrings and a coiled ballerina. What could they want from a 7-year-old's room that was worth shooting her mom and dad?   


Bootsteps climb from the kitchen up the hall. The panic in her goes unfelt as she floats beside the open door, her face pressed into the blue-gray wall as if it might absorb her, but the scav stops short of her parent's room and enters Valerie's, instead.   


"Look at this," a lady says, voice hushing like an air pump. "How old do you think this thing is?"   


Glass shatters. Valerie peeks around the door frame, into the sliver of her room where fragments of mirror glitter across her floor. The man inside, all chains and overbleached hair, places his forefinger on the snow lamp Valerie got for Christmas. "We're here for real shit, not some dumb little tinker box." He coaxes the present from her desk, smirking as it shatters, too.   


"Maybe there's dope in here. Not like you're finding any in all the shit you're trashing." She digs long, pink thumb nails down the velvet interior of the music box. He edges to her side. "Anyway, it looks old. Could sell for preem—

"What the fuck, man?"   


He snaps the box out of her grip, cracks it in his bare hands. Music twangs like popped piano strings, the ballerina springing to the concrete. "No lace here," the man smiles audibly. He sets the splinters on the desk, along with the other knick-knacks of Valerie's the woman had collected. "Better go search the bodies."   


Better search the…   


Her parents…?   


The lady scoffs. She bends out of sight and comes back with the chipped ballerina. "I wanted that."   


"Boohoo."   


The bodies…   


Valerie falls back from the wall—the wall stamped with spotty carmine, and her eyes draw along smeared footprints that trace to the bed. To the storm.   


"You blew their heads off. What am I supposed to do with broke ass implants?"   


"Find one that's not broken."   


"Whatever."   


Stomach boiling, Valerie dips her cupped hands into the puddle at her father's lap, and scatters it across the wall, her tracks, their dresser, a framed photo of her and Grandma V eating ice cream at the Night City mall. A glance—the girl one is stuffing VR gloves in her sack. To sneak through the house soundlessly requires socks. She wears them when her parents insist she sleep in her own room, so by the time they notice she has entered theirs, she's already wormed between them. She riffles through her mother's drawer and shoves a pair on.  


Boot steps. Just a few, and they stop. Valerie toes between spatters of blood and risks looking out of the room. The girl scavenger is facing away, arms crossed and needle green mohawk sticking out of the door frame. Valerie skitters behind her on the pads of her feet.   


"This mission was cracked from the start. This is the last time I hit with you." She turns as Valerie snags inside the laundry room.   


She should expect the juxtaposition by now, remember that there is a man like a bomb gone off in her home, and that nothing will look like itself, but detergent leaking into partially folded laundry, holes knocked in haphazard rows down the walls, the washer blockading the back door, smacks her into stillness. These scavs entered her house like a draft through an open window, gave her family no time to even get out of bed, and gutted everything to the bone. If they could do this to a laundry room...   


"Jesus. Forgot how bad you fucked this place up."   


The man chuckles.   


"This one's still bleeding. Maybe he's got a heart implant."   


Valerie pushes herself up the washer and squeezes her fingers in front of the door's sensor, but she must be too close for it to read, because the light stays red. She slides down—tries to pretend the grate of metal on metal emanating from her parent's room is the same sound she hears when visiting her father's factory, but the saw is too fragmented, too wet.   


"Nothing fucking useful in this house." Chains clink. "How you doin'?"   


"Fucking. great. choom." She grunts. "It's so easy ta work with these planks for people—a little help here?" More chains and shuffling.   


Valerie toes the clean laundry into an empty corner, out of the soap's path, picks a towel out of the dirty laundry and covers the soap. Her mother's splotchy cleaning shirt somehow remained folded. She smoothes the rumples.   


"Finally." The girl sighs. "Have I told you this is the last time we're working together?"   


"If you say shit else, let me know."   


The screwing, the cracking, the bone screeching saws, shift from fragmented into slick precision. Somehow it's worse. Valerie lopes down the hall, to the front door, and stares at the unflinching red dot. She waves her hand in front of it. Stares at the door because it's the stupidest thing she's ever seen. Something she spends every day with, and it wants her dead this badly? She shouldn't bother, but she thumbs the stupid red light, gropes the lock with sticky fingers, shoves soft fingernails between the door and the frame. Nothing. Just more holes along the walls, more shattered junk on the floor, a stack of what the scavs must think are valuables piled beside the hollow cabinets.   


A knife on the kitchen peninsula. It isn't hers.   


Arm outstretched, Valerie ambles to the knife, grasps the bulky, ridged handle, and strokes the sharpened blade. Back to the door. She wedges the blade into the crease. It barely slips between them, but it's sturdy and inflexible, slicing paint and microscopic metal shavings. She tips it to the side, shimmies it down to the lock, twists it left, right. The knife pops out, staggers Valerie, and sings as it scrapes the door.   


A gooey crack. The dismemberment pauses. Valerie pauses.   


"I'll check it out." The girl's footsteps get further away before they come closer.   


_Don't scream, don't cry, don't think._ It's impossible, anyway.   


Valerie leans against the door, slopes to the ground. They never had a chance. Not even to get out of bed. She rolls the knife in the skirt of her nightgown. Maybe Valentine's dad heard all the crashing and is coming to get her.   


"Awe." The girl stops at the edge of the hallway and grins wide at Valerie, whose hands are tucked politely in her lap. "That's cute."   


"What?" The guy shouts.   


"You missed one." She trodds up to Valerie and kneels at her side.   


"No fucking way!"   


"You're not gonna cry?" She soothes, pinching chunks of blood from Valerie's hair as her friend barges down the hall.   


"I don't cry."   


"Tough stuff."   


The man bristles in front of them. "Don't touch it." He snaps. "What cybernetics is the bitch sporting? Or is it human…"   


The girl crawls a hand along the nape of Valerie's neck and pivots to him. "She's flesh."   


"Fuck. How old is she?"   


A light shove when Valerie doesn't answer.   


"Seven."   


The man shifts his legs, the spikes on his boot tips jutting toward Valerie. She lowers her eyes to her lap. He says, "I might know a guy who's looking to make some BD's."   


"Shit…she's like, barely a kid."   


"You wouldn't turn down the eddies if you knew how much."   


"You do a lot of fucked shit, but I didn't take you as the torture type."   


"Jesus—Macy, you don't gotta stand there for it. 25,000 eddies for a kid like that."   


Silence between them.   


"Tune changed. That's what I thought—"   


"Please don't." Valerie catches the girl's red eyes. She isn't very old, a highschooler maybe, but already her neck, jaw, one arm, both legs, are exposed metal and jimmied wire.   


The man grabs the girl's arm and he pulls her toward him. "Shut up, bitch."   


"Don't let him take me, I wanna go home." Despite herself, tears pearl down her cheeks.   


"What did I say—"   


"Les." The girl grabs his bicep, but he shoves her aside and snatches Valerie's face in one hand.   


"I fucking said shut up."   


Valerie jerks the knife into his forearm, and the man screams, yanks, the blade sliding out as if he were cooked tender, and blood pouring fast.   


"Whoa!" The female scav lunges, fist around knife-clutching fist as Valerie gnashes, and kicks, and scratches the air. "Shit." The girl gets an arm around Valerie's waist. Wire fingers lift her, crushing Valerie's back against the girl's torso, hanging her by the arm. She screeches, writhes as the woman let's go of her waist and slaps a hand over her mouth.   


Valerie bites. Flesh pops in her teeth.   


The girl screams slow and guttural, her arm spasming in Valerie's mouth. Then she swings, cracks Valerie's skull against the corner of the wall, and Val drops. The knife drops. The girl crouches, finger cradled in her metal hand. She slowly curls and uncurls the digit, and stands. "I was gonna be _nice_." A boot lands on Valerie's temple.   


  
  


When she opens her eyes next, Valentine's house blurs. Their camera pivots up and down the rope around Valerie's wrists, legs, the rag in her mouth; as the scavs carry her to their van. The shutters are closed, except one slit at the bottom of the living room window. The guy scav opens the van door. The shutters close as the girl shoves her inside.

* * *


End file.
